Friday, May 4, 2012

The F & L Hall of Fame: Jake and the Stiffs

If
you asked longtime Now Wave Magazine contributor Johnny Problem to name one
band from our time that should have been huge, he’d tell you Jake and the
Stiffs. And I would concur. If you ever saw them live, you’d be on board as
well. To this day, I hear songs like “Holly”, “All I Said”, “High School
Blues”, and “Jennifer” and can’t quite believe they’re not remembered as punk
classics of their time! Oh well. If there’s any lesson we’ve all learned in
underground music over the years, it’s that sometimes making good music is the worst
thing you can do if your band wants to “make” it. There have been a few
exceptions, but for the most part, quality music hasn’t been saleable on a mass level for 25 years. So why fret? Let’s just be thankful for bands who
care more about making great music than they do about “succeeding”. Let’s be
thankful for bands like Jake and the Stiffs!

Out
of all the criminally overlooked songwriters of my time, Randy America may have
been the most criminally overlooked. Even within the punk world, Jake
and the Stiffs were always a little under the radar. And I think it’s because
they were ahead of their time. In the mid-’90s, “pop-punk” usually meant a
second-rate Screeching Weasel or a third-rate Ramones. But the Jake and the
Stiffs version of pop/punk was more akin to The Dickies or The Boys, steeped in
the style of old school punk and informed by power pop. If they had come up in today’s punk
scene, in the heyday of Dirtnap and Douchemaster Records, they probably would
have hit it big! In spite of the fact that they were a popular regional act (based
out of Wilmington, Delaware and tangentially part of the West Chester, PA
scene), I never knew much about them until I saw them play at the Blue Star in
Lancaster circa 1998. I was blown away. They came out and plowed through song
after song of super-catchy punk rock with balls and personality. They covered
“Zodiac” by The Rip Offs. The bass player bled. They were everything I liked
about punk music combined into one band. And they had songs. I couldn’t believe they didn’t have an
album out on a big label! I tracked down their Spike 7” (which I still
possess in spite of recently unloading the rest of my vinyl collection). I saw
them a couple more times - again at the Blue Star and once at a pizza joint in
Wilmington with The Pits. They killed it every time. A few years later, I
finally got to review one of their recordings when Mutant Pop Records put out
their If It Ain’t Stiff…It Ain’t Worth A Fuck CD. I fucking loved it.
The Mutant Pop fan base was not enthralled. After all, they didn’t sound like
Screeching Weasel.

Eventually, both Randy America and Algy Siouxcide from Jake and the Stiffs became writers for Now
Wave. Man, those were the good old days! One of my great memories of that time
period was when Algy made me a homemade Jake and the Stiffs comp CD. I loved
that thing! That disc somehow got lost in the chaos of me moving a few years
back, but luckily I was able to download the posthumous best-of Laurie’s
Other Life off of iTunes. Released in 2008, it includes the above-mentioned
gems as well as other should-have-been hits like “Scrappy” and the classic title
track. So it’s not like this band’s music has been lost to the world forever. I
was a little dismayed with the lack of information on-line about Jake and the
Stiffs, so I asked Randy to compile a band discography. He and Algy put their
heads together, and so here we have an official unofficial list of everything
JATS ever released:

Where are they now? Randy
America is currently at work on a solo album, and of course Algy Siouxicide is with the almightyKeefs.
You can still stream some of Jake and Stiffs’ music at their myspace page. Laurie's
Other Life is available on iTunes or from Amazon.com.
And check out these clips! One is from way back in the day, and the other is from a
one-off reunion the band did this past New Year!

1 comment:

Explosive Kate played with those guys a million times and I swear I never saw a bad JATS show. Even trashed, those guys dropped a veritable Bomb of Rock on anyone fortunate enough to pack into the Barn Door that night. Hands down, Delaware's Greatest Band.

About Me

Former head honcho at Now Wave Magazine, still writing about '77 style punk, power pop, garage/trash, and straight-up rock n' roll. I generally do not ask for review submissions. If you have something you'd like me to hear, please send digital submissions only. Due to life demands, I will be scaling the blog back to just a few reviews a month. I apologize in advance for being unable to review most of the submissions that are sent my way. fasterandlouderblog@gmail.com